Harder in easier ways

I have moved from the "You've got your hands full!" years to the "I don't know how you do it" years. Weird since I still have my hands full, but whatever. The point is that the chatty public indicates to me a general impression that my life is impossibly hard. It is not. I just have a lot of things to do. In many ways, it is easier than the years when all I had to do was wait for something bad to almost happen and maybe try to get something made for supper while I waited (lesson learned: as soon as you start trying to get something made for supper, something bad will happen).

I often say that it gets easier, but that is shorthand. It is more accurate to say that it gets harder, but in easier ways. For me, there has been nothing harder than a first baby. The hardness has become broader but shallower as babies are added. I have never been more desperately exhausted, more horrified and hobbled by physical pain, more lonely and close to despair than I was that first time around. The new and growing demands are more quantitative than qualitative. Although packing for a trip or bagging the groceries or just getting everybody through breakfast is far more time-consuming and personally taxing than it used to be, I would take those jobs any day over a trip back to the Baby 1 era. (Yes, I find bagging groceries for eight people personally taxing. I am a wimp.)

Maybe this is just me and my androidish inclination to tasks over people. I love the people, but they wear me out terribly and I am relieved that there is now an "each other" for them to have rather than only a me. The tunnel years of running a little-kid-only house are real, although no one in a two-kid society is able to recognize them as such. It is hard work of getting to the big family stage, and although it doesn't strictly get easier, it does change, and that helps.